Stereolab - Dots and Loops (1997)

Dots and Loops, as produced for the most part by John McEntire of Tortoise fame, assisted by Mouse on Mars on a couple of tunes, is a more electronic sounding Stereolab album, and nowhere near as Kraut-rocking as the previous albums had been. Instead, there's a lot of jazz and funk flavor to a lot of these tunes. Horn and string arrangement crop up in lieu of guitars, which are relegated to the background, keyboards are even more on the foreground and a lot of electronic percussion either complements or replaces the drums, depending on a song. It's hard to believe Stereolab was still a rock band an album ago. "Refractions In The Plastic Pulse" is a highlight with its multiple section epic, as is "Contronatura" on a slightly smaller scale, but "Prisoner Of Mars" on the other hand is a drab attempt at loungy trip-hop and "Parsec" is essentially pseudo-jazz "spiced up" with bland and dated drum&bass styled percussion. Elsewhere, "Miss Modular", "Flower Called Nowhere" and "Ticker Tape of the Unconscious" are memorable songs with layered instrumentation and laid back melodies that sound even lusher, if also a bit too polished than Stereolab's earlier lounge gems, whereas "Diagonals" is essentially a rather flaccid pseudo-jazz version of "Metronomic Underground".

Nonetheless, this record brought both new fans to the band as well as turning off some of the older ones who were more in tune with the band's Kraut-rock side. Whatever a listener thinks of this album depends largely on ones predilection towards electronic music as well as jazz and lounge oriented music. Just as there's good and bad in absolutely every style of music, so is Dots and Loops made up of either hits or misses in the styles pursued here. The production on this record is excellent and pristine, as John McEntire is one of the most accomplished producers and record engineers in experimental music, even if Dots and Loops is one of the few Stereolab albums that explicitly sounds like a nineties product, this coming from a band otherwise known for combining sounds and styles into timeless amalgams.